Page:The Specimen Case.djvu/157

148 everything that he can possibly require," replied the Premier.

"Very good, sir." He still lingered, however, and his eye rested on Brampton Reed suspiciously. "I understand," he ventured, "that this gentleman"

"That is all we require," said the Premier, with suave decision. "Mr. Reed is—one of ourselves."

"Tilbury; Gravesend," indicated one of the alert looking young men standing on the upper platform of Die Wasser-jungfer. "Chatham and Rochester there together. Woolwich? No, you cannot identify it. It is among the glow over there—London."

"Really London at last," soliloquised another. "Ach!"

"You may well say 'at last,' Steinetz," struck in an aviator-engineer. "Ten years ago I myself dated this invasion for 1906."

"Fortunately for you that you were wrong," said the first speaker, "or you would not have been in it. Late or not, here we are—where the great Napoleon never got."

"Ah? he was too much for himself and for conquest, that Corsican. If he had been inspired by humanity and a love of fatherland, he would have gone further."

The five great Krupp-Parsevals were lying "anchored" in what was then known, for the purposes of aerial navigation, as the fourth atmospheric zone, above the fields and villages of Kent. The previous day, immediately upon Germany's official notification to the British Government that Lord Shipley's action with regard to the Ankori affair was regarded as a hostile move, the world for the first time learned of the secret works in West-